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Communications

Tools of communication have transformed American society time and again over the past two centuries. The Museum has preserved many instruments of these changes, from printing presses to personal digital assistants.

The collections include hundreds of artifacts from the printing trade and related fields, including papermaking equipment, wood and metal type collections, bookbinding tools, and typesetting machines. Benjamin Franklin is said to have used one of the printing presses in the collection in 1726.

More than 7,000 objects chart the evolution of electronic communications, including the original telegraph of Samuel Morse and Alexander Graham Bell's early telephones. Radios, televisions, tape recorders, and the tools of the computer age are part of the collections, along with wireless phones and a satellite tracking system.

PhoneMate’s model 5000 answering machine sold for about $120 in the late 1980s. In order to save space many answering machine makers adopted a tape cartridge that was much smaller than the standard audio cassette. The model 5000 took this miniaturization one step further by reducing the size of entire machine. One advertisement shows the unit being held in a man’s hand.

This PhoneMate model 6950 illustrates answering machine technology in the midst of radical change. From the earliest designs in the 1900s, answering machines used magnetic recording technology, recording on either wire or coated tape. Most machines of the 1960s and 1970s used two tapes, one for the outgoing message and one to record the incoming message. Advances in digital memory design during the 1980s led the model 6950's designers to eliminate the outgoing message tape by using digital memory instead. The incoming message was still recorded on a standard tape cassette. The suggested retail price was $179.98.

This PhoneMate model 960 telephone answering machine was advertised as "SAM" or Smart Answering Machine. The user carried a small remote control and could retrieve messages by calling from any location. A tone emitted by the remote control activated the play-back function on the recorder.

This is a commercial version of "Butler In A Box", an electronic home controller system designed by professional magician Gus Searcy and computer programmer Franz Kavan. This unit sold for between $1500 and $3000 depending on the accessories needed to meet a customer’s requests. Butler In A Box required microphones for users’ voice inputs, and different controllers for thermostats, light circuits, alarm systems and telephone access. Aside from sales to luxury-home owners, Mastervoice also marketed the product to physically challenged people who might have difficulty operating traditional electrical switches and controls.

This hand-made circuit board served as the brain for Gus Searcy and Franz Kavan’s "Butler In A Box" electronic home controller. In addition to the various capacitors, resistors and transistors on the board, there are two integrated circuits. The idea was to couple emerging computer technology with novel wireless devices and make a product that could control a variety of electrical devices in a home.

Motorola produced this BPR 2000 model pager around 1982. Prior to the widespread availability of inexpensive cell phones many people carried telephone pagers to stay in contact with work or home. A miniature radio receiver, a pager alerted the user that someone needed to talk to them and provided the call-back number. The BPR 2000 featured a dual address and numerical display to also show the user the source of an incoming call. Later alphanumeric pagers could communicate messages to the user. Pager use declined as cell phone coverage expanded across the U.S.

This “AutoMatic TelePhone” unit combines an answering machine with a telephone. Like many early answering machines, the tape is not in a removable format. Twenty minutes of recording time is permitted before the tape must be erased and reset to the beginning. A more advanced model featured a remote access feature that allowed the user to use a small tone-generator to activate the machine from any telephone.

This front-loading Betamax video recorder was manufactured by Sony at the height of the company’s competition with producers of the rival VHS format. Beta recorders initially featured a one hour recording cassette, later lengthened to match VHS. Early Beta machines were slightly larger than early VHS units and designers struggled to put a quality audio signal on the tape without compromising video signal quality. Both formats were available for about ten years but ultimately Sony could not solve the audio-video problem without a major redesign that made newer tapes incompatible with older machines. Sony dropped the Beta format in 1988.

David Lance Goines is known as a writer and lecturer as well as an illustrator and printer of both letterpress and offset lithography, his work much exhibited and collected throughout the country. But his Arts and Crafts influenced design is best known on his posters and in books. Goines was a recognized activist in Berkeley, associated with the Free Speech and Anti-War movements, and he did poster and book work for these movements.

Alice Waters, who founded the Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, was a founding inspiration of the fresh, local, and organic food movement. She met David Goines in the Berkeley Free Speech movement. They began to collaborate on a column, “Alice’s Restaurant” for the local alternative paper. She wrote the recipes and he provided the artwork. He collected and printed each column as Thirty Recipes for Framing and the entire set and individual prints from the set began to appear on Berkeley walls and beyond, establishing him with enough profits to buy the Berkeley Free Press, rechristened the St. Hieronymus Press.

He issued his first Chez Panisse poster, "Red-Haired Lady," in 1972 and his most recent, "41st Anniversary," in 2012. In between is a series of anniversary posters, plus occasional others celebrating the restaurant's book releases, such as the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook, and other ventures. These works established his place as the primary artist associated with food and wine in the so-called Gourmet Ghetto. His early posters for Chez Panisse were soon followed by requests from other food and wine related sites and events, as well as from many other commercial entities.

The design for this 1987 poster by David Lance Goines was first commissioned as a bottle label by Corti Brothers Grocery in Sacramento to note the introduction of some of the first extra-virgin olive oil made in the United States. According to Corti, the labels were originally made for Antinori, the great Italian wine (and olive oil) producer, but a freeze knocked out the olive crop. Antinori returned the labels to Corti, whose grocery was to carry the Antinori oil. Corti got Goines to re-do the labels for the Pallido and Verdesco oils, “Extra Virgin Olive Oil from Spring Harvest Mission Olives,” simultaneously requesting a large number of the 4 color posters (unsigned, number130 in the Goines repertory) which he (Corti) could sell in the store. He also obtained the progressives from Goines, eventually giving the set of progressives and several of the posters to the National Museum of American History in 2012. The poster documents the arrival in the U.S. of the first wave of soon-to-be well known and much favored California-produced olive oils.

Many credit Darrell Corti for introducing chefs, food writers, and food critics to some of the high grades of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, American wines such as Zinfandel, and other foods that have become staples across America.

This Starlight 222 model lantern was manufactured by the Star Headlight & Lantern Company of Honeoye Falls, New York in 1989. The Star Company replaced their metal lanterns with acrylic plastic lanterns like this one beginning in 1989. This side of this lantern is stamped with the text “PRODUCED IN OUR 100th Year 1889-1989” surrounding the Star Company logo. The lantern has sockets for two bulbs; the bare bulb with reflector below the lantern body was used for signaling while the smaller adjacent bulb makes a focused beam that could be used as a flashlight. The Starlight model was available in several colors with a choice of railroad logos on the side.

Before the advent of portable two way radios, train crews communicated via hand signals during the day, and lantern signals during periods of low visibility or at night. Hand lantern signals are still used in situations when radio intercommunication is impractical. Specific motions of the lantern convey precise instructions such as “Clear to Depart;" "Move the train Forward;" "Move the train Backward;" "Slow Down;" "Slow Down Further;" or "Stop and Remain Stopped."